Topic Lords

Jim Stormdancer

Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week.

  1. 5 DAYS AGO

    312. Rubber Baby Knopfler Romplers

    Lords: * Danny * https://nightbrunchband.com/ * Walker * https://nightbrunchband.com/ Topics: * You Probably Think This Song is About You * The Perfect r/crappymusic Post: An audio tour of Archetypes * https://media24.fireside.fm/file/fireside-uploads-2024/images/3/3597ddeb-e52e-4cda-a59c-c64600489fea/0291r0zf.jpg * https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6EIwP0zerbk * Sample-based film scores in the 80s * https://www.tumblr.com/mogwaipoet/786937779224461312/terminator-2-1991-and-the-princess-bride-1987 * Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep, by Clare Harner actually * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DoNotStandatMyGraveand_Weep * Being a Video Game Newb in Your 40s Microtopics: * Is it a Topic or is it Just Banter? * Cleaning Lords, Lunch Lords and Cat Lords. * Have you heard the good word about the Gaylady? * Night Brunch. * Wearing your own band's t-shirt. * A thing that could happen for a while and then was no longer able to happen. * Hi Cindy! * Motivating yourself to work harder via self loathing. * Feeling the need to act all angsty so that people take you seriously as an artist. * A Touch of Grandiosity. * How many tracks get uploaded to SoundCloud every day? * Continuing to discover music from the 1970s. * It's called "Topic Lords," not "Correct Lords." * Once it becomes impossible to make new music, and we go back and start listening to all the SoundCloud uploads with 0 listens. * All the kids at Rock & Roll Camp getting excited about Lofey. * Pretending a topic is about one thing when it's actually about something else. * Canadian Actor Dave Coulier. * Tuesday at 3:01pm. * Learning a new chord on your Electric Tenor Guitar. * Bringing Pokemon Puzzle League characters into your love song. * Having a whole week to dial in that wub wub patch. * What art is for and what art should be for. * Fun is our only reward. * The objective best pitch wheel range. * The Funky Worm preset. * Synthesizers that can save and load patches but only when plugged into your phone. * Coming up with a Rube Goldberg machine to upload patches from a web server to your CZ-5000. * thisdx7cartridgedoesnotexist.com * In a convex optimization problem, there is no gradient to descend. * Fiddling with the synthesizer sliders until you reach a corner of the parameter space that doesn't make any noise and giving up. * Camp Counselor Grant hastily drawing all the synthesizer waves on the board. * Ask any Geometer, the triangle has three sides. Love triangles are actually just two love segments. * The All Topic Fakeouts episode. * The gulf between how an artist thinks they're presenting themselves and how they're being received. * A Beautiful Rainbow of the Human Experience. * Elderly rappers with excellent flow but terrible drip. * Piling onto propaganda music. * Someone doing their own thing with confidence and authenticity. * Graffiti with immaculate copyediting. * With improved access to art tools, taste is one of the only things left to get wrong. * Only the best crappy music. * Promoting your music in r/crappymusic. * Tori the Clown Rap Gal. * The audacity of extreme autotune. * All Youtube thumbnails converging on the same cognitive attention hacks. * Singing the comments on your last video. * Situations where echo chamber amplification is fun and good for the world. * Obscure Music That Slaps. * Serbian Kolos. * The Ketron Event Chrom. * The Nightmare Klaxon that Represents Dread. * All the Fairlight CMI presets used in the Terminator 2 soundtrack. * Growing up playing samples at every possible speed in Impulse Tracker. * Slowly sucking dog food out of a can to simulate the sound of a mimetic polyalloy passing through steel bars. * It's been a long day and you're ready to go home but you need to slam 1000 more inverted glasses into bowls of yogurt, let's hurry it up guys. * That one sample library squeaking metal door sound that everyone uses. * Calling out comb filtering whenever you hear someone exhale deeply while sitting down at a desk. * The sound guy instructing all the actors when to breathe to minimize comb filtering. * Rubber Baby Knopfler Romplers. * All the things you are after you die. * The purpose of suffering. (So we can write cool poems about it.) * Making art about how trauma used to exist. * Why wireheading will not solve our problems. (Because everything uses bluetooth now.) * Who needs trauma when we have CRISPR? * Shepherding noobs. * Play Any Video Game Day. * Complicated goose controls. * Trying to play Portal as your first 3D game. * Learning video games vs. learning board games. * Trying to get into video game series that don't change. * Looking at the screen and/or ants until it coalesces into an image. * Video games filled with really gross blood squirt sounds. * Jumping on and off of buildings. * Playing Breath of the Wild and just collecting mushrooms and herbs. * Grass simulation in Breath of the Wild vs. in Horizon Zero Dawn. * Putting yourself in the head-space of the protagonist in order to do protagonist stuff. * Spelling brunch the secret way.

    1h 21m
  2. 6 OCT

    311. Godzilla's Daily Routine

    Lords: * John * Fif Topics: * Accidentally exploring a bunch of related subjects and/or media * The excellent progression system of Blues' Clues ABCs (1995) * https://archive.org/details/blues-clues-blues-abc-time-activities-pc-cd-rom * Salty Licorice is the sixth taste * https://www.zmescience.com/science/news-science/a-sixth-sense-of-taste-salty-licorice/ * https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salty_liquorice * The Cubivore between-level limerick * https://www.mobygames.com/game/11346/cubivore-survival-of-the-fittest/credits/gamecube/ * 55,555 names Microtopics: * Modern problems requiring modern solutions. * Leaving media behind. * Subscribing to PBS Passport via your local PBS affiliate. * Running out of media and just watching Peaceful Skeleton Realm Attacked By Helicopter over and over again. * Whether the Arctic Circle requires any age verification. * What even are Truck Nuts? * Why do trucks have such tiny nuts?? * Watching a movie every day because you're unemployed. * I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. * Independent used bookstores in the San Diego Area. * Used bookstores desperately trying to get rid of math textbooks. * The original Topic Lords. * Having a lot of knowledge that you can call on in a useful way. * Being old and having learned a lot of stuff. * Your mom describing your brain as "a bric-a-brac of useless facts." * Science Fiction Hall of Fame. * The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue. * Someone who you forget as soon they go out of sight. * An SCP from the perspective of the SCP. * A really cool interactive fiction scene in France. * Rules lawyering your way out of yet another curse. * The 17th century demon cursing you to live forever and also that "whenever you send an email people won't be able to read what you wrote, they'll just say 'not more dick pill spam.'" * Word-based minigames. * The blank was in the sky. Blue had fun with her blank. * Making a game for three year olds warning them about insecure pedants on the Internet. * What year of our Lord was Bully released? * We don't talk about the 2010s. * The Milton Bradley Microvision. * The game is about cubes eating and fucking. * Trying to describe any flavor * Blue the Dog. * Scandinavian Delicacy Ammonium Chloride. * A quest to track down Circus Peanuts. * An edible earplug that tastes like fake bananas. * Red Vines and Black Red Vines. * Being the only grocery store in town that sells licorice and reeling in the only licorice eater in town. * That Rotting Shark Dish. * The white people equivalent of huitlacoche. * The Secret Cowbell. * The hip hop community realizing that you can increase the delay on the kick drum and rattle your entire car for several seconds. * Tigers can't see the sideshow, only cows can see the sideshow. * Piggy Fif. * A classic poem about cubes fucking. * Checking GameFAQs for a list of poems in Cubivore. * Piggy Playername's extremely distinctive manner of speaking. * Atlus Beast and Editing Beast. * The Cubivore trophy in Super Smash Bros. * A genetic progression that you need to do by transmogrifying into a progression of various beasts. * Entering a tunnel shaped like a heart and sitting in a flesh colored void until you attract 20 females into your harem. * Want to mate? Yes/no. * The Cubivore manual with the cutaway diagram of cube physiology. * Bully/Cubivore crossover fic. * Little Samson. * Get good at enjoying video games without being validated by a tiny purple cube, scrub. * The file you keep of all the names you'll answer to. * Pith, fip, pince, fifth, and fint. * People: they have a lot of names. * Being diagnosably bad at code switching. * Writing a random number of fs as a symbol representing your employee. * Choosing to be the banana taped to the wall. * Gaming naming. * Printing up a deck of constraints for when you're asking people to choose a name for you. * Paraeducation. * Jobs at The MADE. * The Worst Nintendo Store. * Teaching game design to young children every Saturday morning. * The forefront of the next generation of digital creators.

    1h 5m
  3. 29 SEPT

    310. Dance Like The Universe Is An Empty Wasteland

    Lords * Alexander * Kev Topics: * "Floaty movement" in games * The power to give people clutter that they can't throw away * https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/users/yorkdoom/palweb/week12/palwk12.htm * https://www.anabuzzalino.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/book-of-kells.jpg * Dunning Kruger got debunked! * https://economicsfromthetopdown.com/2022/04/08/the-dunning-kruger-effect-is-autocorrelation/ * With or Without Witnesses, by Hasbro, Inc. * https://scryfall.com/card/jmp/457/alloy-myr * Esper says: "A lot of the lore and worldbuilding of Magic is conveyed through flavor text, but there’s also about a novel’s worth of writing for each set distributed as webfiction and a few dozen novels throughout the game's history. It’s good stuff, usually!" * The instinct to not swing a heavy object at someone, even when you're supposed to * Japanese curry Microtopics: * The Humble Screw. * What it might take to be good at hammering nails. * Fingerbashing. * An inclined plane that goes around in a circle. * Metric Rules Football. * Whether a state machine is the same kind of thing as a wedge. * Clockwork Maiden. * Speedrunning, cleaning and dating. * Floaty movement. * The JPEG artifact of physics simulation. * How to Unit Test a video game. * Using MIDI knobs to tune your game's physics. * Game Oriented Assembly Lisp. * Hot Reloading Workflow. * Why Naughty Dog stopped using Lisp. * Just going about your life when suddenly you have to use Perl for something. * Peak Node.JS/SAAS years. * Walk/run/sprint transition speed. * Getting an special drink for your guys. * Medieval style calligraphy. * Gifting someone with a burden for the rest of their lives. * Pouring rocks into your dad's pocket because that's where you keep your rocks. * The kitten going to sleep behind your laptop because it's warm back there. * Here's how someone in the 14th century would've written these words. * How to say "fuck around and find out" in medieval Latin. * Writing a meme in 14th century Blackletter Hand. * Sans-serif calligraphy. * The ancient Greeks trying to invent ASCII art but they couldn't close the deal. * Letters placed inside other letters. * Autocorrelation. * Figures 8 and 9. * Coming out of discussion the topic with a better understanding of the topic. * Using a bird feather to write. * Knowledge that we used to have and now have again. * Learning to Topic Lords while doing home improvement stuff. * Scrapping your fragile human body to merge with the machines. * Rainbows in Space. * Suns going around in circles regardless of whether anyone's looking. * A semi-conscious little robot dude. * Calling the Qualia Function. * A real messed-up looking machine cat. * Communicating the story solely via flavor text on mana dorks. * A squadron of little kids waving wooden swords at each other. * How do you turn sword fighting into something you can do in a video game? * East Bay Rat Motorcycle Club Flight Nights. * Situations where they ask if you want a mouth guard. * Asking the ref at the boxing match what the etiquette is for tapping out. * The crowd roaring when they realize you're a southpaw. * Punching a guy you just met three seconds ago. * Did you end up cutting that girl's head off? * Renaissance MMA. * That Awkward Sparring Feeling. * A simulacrum of kicking each other in the face. * Getting a part-time job at your favorite curry shop so you can learn the recipe. * What part of curry is the curry? * The curry you eat so you don't die. * Emperor Riding a Dragon to the Forbidden Palace. * The advantage of a burger as a fast food staple. * How to make curry convenient. * Rendang. * Dry curry. * Joining a discord and asking "what are all these users for??" * Which user is which lord on which episode?

    1h 3m
  4. 22 SEPT

    309. Shaking Ass To Music For Airports

    Lords: * Megan * https://www.megancarnesmusic.com/ * Austin * https://austinmwav.com/ Topics: * Going for a super long walk is amazing * "Elevated" horror is a sham * I was there when Every 5x5 Nonogram section 303 finished * NPC Dialog Test by Nintendo Europe #NintendoEurope * https://x.com/MarioBrothBlog/status/1863976914349621280 * My breakfast dogma * Not bringing my shitpost music/mashup ideas to life because I'm afraid they'll be more popular than my actual music Microtopics: * Music for films and video games. * The Paper Labyrinths theme. * Feeding your cats and yourself. * Exercising, drinking water, you know, all of the worst things. * Explaining to the doctor that you're depressed and he asks if you've been eating well and exercising and you say "no, because I've been depressed." * Turning 35 and becoming interested in birds. * Shazam for birds. * Birdpilled and Avianmaxxing. * Taking the L in Chicago and eating Dick's in Seattle. * Cream cheese on a hot dog. * The late Chicago on a Bun. * Regional food that you get outside of the region. * St. Louis style barbecue. * Ordering Jack in the Box at 1am and regretting it immediately because you are in your 30s. * Eating a spicy chicken sandwich in the prime gremlin hours. * Feeling bad because you ate bad. * Forty years later, thinking "Maybe I shouldn't have eaten all that White Castle" * The kind of person who would call himself a genius. * Sometimes it's fun to be goofy and have fun. * Horror movies vs. anxiety movies. * Media imbibers. * The film critic opinions of your Trekkie mom. * The high audience score, low critic score, and vice versa. * Applauding a huge pile of garbage. * Whether anyone ever self-applied the "IDM" genre. * The Oscar Genre. * Very good movies nominated for Oscars. * Braindance. * Cringe (Derogatory) * The only good form of multiplayer. * One of the hominids that watched a different great ape figure out fire. * What happens when they run out of nonograms? * Morons welcome! * Twitch plays Every 5x5 Nonogram. * Twitch plays Dark Souls never getting out of that pool of water in the tutorial area. * Every star going out at the same time. * In the short run, everyone will be fine. * Getting bored of your death anxiety. * Life is meaningless and nothing matters and that rules actually. * Extremely sensible anxieties. * Setting an alarm to periodically tell your friend that you're not annoying and I don't hate you. * Whether everyone should be afraid of heights. * A database of all the kinds of movements a rollercoaster can make so you can search for the types you like. * Do you ever get thirsty? Studies say people with ADHD need to drink water. * Taking a drug test at your job and worrying that the test people will notice that you're dehydrated. * The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog in all caps. * Mr. Jock, TV quiz PhD. * There really are castles in the eyes of people see them. * Role-playing the skeleton of Ben Shapiro in a D&D campaign. * What's the difference between being an asshole and role playing an asshole? * The 'shopkeepers are not copyeditors" apostrophe. * Eating your breakfast burrito over the counter. * Things that people say are good for your mental health. * Anxiety medication that gives you terrible nightmares. * Your anxiety meds making you feel okay about the zombie apocalypse. * Revenge bedtime procrastination. * The kidnapping advice episode. (FBI don't listen to this one.) * Kids are funny. (Just trust us.) * Playing in a band with your best friend for fifteen years. * Kids: they're sticky everywhere. * Never making any shitposts because someone might like them better than your regular art. * Receiving a series of increasingly aggressive answering machine messages from the piece of public art across the street from your apartment.

    1h 12m
  5. 15 SEPT

    308. A Xylophone For Jandek

    Lords: * John * Avery * Jay Topics: * Being known for one thing and trying to do a different thing * https://jtholen.bandcamp.com/album/new-active-object * Finding instruments on the street * Accidentally arguing with sauna guy Microtopics: * Many-Time Topic Lord John Mystery. * Talking the plunge into the Topic Lords discord. * An unspoken constant presence like Seymour Glass in the Glass Family novels. * The Once and Future Musician. * Putting a formant filter on your organ so you can play the organ on Zoom. * Why pouring hot water sounds different from pouring cold water. * The sound of boiling hot urine. * The top rated coffee shop in San Francisco on Yelp for seven months in a row. * Remaining your coffee shop after Mark Zuckerberg in hopes that he'll show up in person. * Trying to open up a coffee shop in late 90s San Francisco and only realizing too late that it's 2016. * ADA compliant seating. * Four-person episodes of Topic Lords. * A 6'5" guy trying to barter a half-used spray paint can for a cup of coffee. * The Menacing Barterer. * Aggressive Wimpy gladly paying you tomorrow for a hamburger today or else. * Aggressive Wimpy throwing a shoe at your espresso machine. * Your car accidentally becoming an art car. * Letting people spray paint your car until it's nothing but spray paint. * Calling 911 and explaining that the guy menacing you needs marijuana. * Being detained by Mark Zuckerberg's private security force. * Living near Mark Zuckerberg's house so you can do whatever your fixation with Mark Zuckerberg is. * Aggressive Barter Guy trying to barter a Porsche for a cup of coffee. * The $6 Porsche. * Tholen or Tholen. * A prog album constructed from Klik n Play samples. * When someone who does I've things decides to do something else. * The Mountain Goats novelizations. * Leonard Cohen's terrible poetry. * Thinking a song is deeply meaningful until you read the lyrics. * New Active Object. * Lunch Music. * Doing a thing for a long time and getting good at it. * Who has time to read a novel? * Having Game Boys Advance but still reading books sometimes. * Telling your teacher that you need to go to your job at NASA and they're like "oh you must be doing something important over there" * Working in the waterslide industry. * The Joy of Being the Secrets Guy. * Reading too much into it is the next Frog Fractions game. * Admitting to your wife that you found a digital piano on the curb. * The digital piano in the background of the Frog Fractions 2 pitch video. * Walking by a theremin at a party and it chirps at you like a proximity car alarm. * The Moog Etherwave. * Staring at your broken Omnichord. * A toddler whose first word is "mandolin." * Living Out Yonder. * The Roland Space Echo. * A cassette tape except there isn't any cassette, the tape is just kind of wriggling around in there. * Buying synthesizers from thrift shops that don't know how to tell whether synthesizers are broken. * The Two Organs Behind Me. * Ukelins. * Zither-esques. * Dulcimers vs. hammered dulcimers. * Looping your song and picking the notes that kind of sound like they belong. * A Xylophone For Jandek. * Feeling like you're taking to extremely accomplished people and you're just a weird little guy. * Who Is Sauna Guy?? * Stuck debating sauna guy while the venerated author with similar interests to yours is holding court in the next room. * Physics Philosophy guy talking about physics and philosophy. * An hour into the conversation, telling Sauna Guy that you don't even like being warm and he just stares at you. * The new way to joke about forum URLs. * Back when the Internet was full of exciting possibilities. * What topics turn you into Sauna Guy. * David Byrne sitting alone at the David Byrne art exhibit in Palo Alto. * We're All Sauna Guy Now. * Voting each other off the podcast. * Lightning round sudden death topics. * When the sunscreen finally makes it onto your cornea. * Not having a home page again but meaning to someday.

    1h 9m
  6. 15 SEPT

    308B. Oops, All Microtopics!

    This is the pre-show planning and banter for episode 308, recorded and edited basically by accident?? Enjoy?? Microtopics: * The old saw that if the teacher is 15 minutes late, you are excused. * All the hosts forgetting about the podcast so that episode just doesn't get recorded. * The seam in the fish video. * Procedurally vs. manually textured terrain. * How to texture a limestone chunk. * Whether Donkey Kong Bananza is deliberately evoking the sickly sheen of Donkey Kong Country's raytraced art. * Procedurally decorating terrain in Techtonica. * A lens flare shaped like bananas. * Mario Kart opinions. * Doing a stunt for the next 30 seconds. * The Baja 1000 but with Mario Kart. * How Mario Kart tries to make highways interesting. * A souped-up Volkswagen Beetle driving 1000 miles through the desert * Mario Kart except it's Desert Bus. * A Hunter S. Thompson stand-in sent to report on Mario Kart races and ranting about the Mushroom Kingdom. * Keeping your powder dry in case your anecdote gets promoted to Topic. * Topics that have been in the bucket for a long time and probably will remain there for a long time. * Doing a brass fall with your mouth. * Finally learning to play "Imagine" on piano. * Zoom's musician mode. * Going on a date with twins to the same restaurant but neither one knows about the other, so you have to keep going into the bathroom and parting your hair the other way. * The episode of Three's Company where there's a misunderstanding. * Don Knotts making a weird face. * Your prospective roommates explaining that you have to pretend to be gay so the landlord doesn't think you're all having sex with each other. * More behind than ahead. * Keeping cats in the Storage Atrium. * Buying an organ from a salvage yard. * Bartering with the organ maker's apprentice. * The Estey Organ Company. * Playing a bad prog rock solo on the analog synthesizer next to your couch. * An organ with all of its organs showing. * An accordion with zero subtlety. * The difference between an electric piano and a digital piano. * The Yamaha Clavinova with Advanced Wave Modeling. * Don't play these notes unless you want to hear them forever. * Topic Negotiation. * Driving every single topic into the ground.

    28 min
  7. 8 SEPT

    307. The Bad Boy Of Crossword Construction

    Lords: * Ben * Avery Topics: * The Mishima Incident, in which one of the most famous authors in Japan created his own private militia of young men, attempted to overthrow the government and, upon failing, committed ritual suicide. * City-wide game of hide and seek * How to stick it to bad Bluetooth actors * The Carrotman's Lament, by E.L. Hubert * https://x.com/sweetstench/status/1724958011754504568 * Esper says: "Avery’s anecdote about the carrot poem being something he’d do in high school reminded me of something I did in high school, where I took the song 'The Cha Cha Slide' and removed every instance of 'slide to the right' and added a bunch of 'slide to the left' so that people eventually collapsed into the wall. I got to do it at a little party with friends, and it paid off nicely." Microtopics: * Where to play some crosswords. * Cruciverbalism. * Putting the black squares where the letters don't go. * Putting structural jokes in your crossword puzzles. * The cleverer the gimmick, the less fun the crossword puzzle. * Talking into your phone's transcription software during a five hour drive and having five hours of gibberish at the end of it. * Fifth caller wins a t-shirt! * Impossible Owls. * Squishy details. * Taking on an apprenticeship with a nobel prize winner. * The Japanese Self-Defense Force. * Dressing in bee keeper outfits and hitting each other with sticks. * Buying swords for your right wing ultra nationalist militia with the proceeds of your prize-winning literature. * Exhorting the troops to reinstate the emperor of Japan but nobody can hear you because there's a helicopter flying overhead. * A poster of a kitten next to a poster of a samurai, with diametrically opposed mantras about how you ought to handle failure. * Topics that leave you speechless. * Founder Brain. * Debunking a thing from philosophy. * The Philosophy of Reversing a Linked List. * The alternate universe where Banksy is a totalitarian dictator. * Vladimir Putin tagging up the streets of Bristol in the 90s. * Top hat, eyeball and coattails. * The Residents of Theseus. * Rednex. * David Bowie starring as Tesla in The Prestige and self-driving off the set. * The percentage of Teslas on the street * Nice Stylized T as a Screw Shirt. * Brainstorming places to hide in Copenhagen. * The problem of how to define the bounds of the hide and seek legal play field. * Playing hide and seek and knocking on a stranger's door and asking if you can hide in their house. * Knocking on the door of the company that moved into the building your company was in six years ago, asking to use the conference room because you're six years late for a meeting. * Journey to the End of the Night. * Playing music and speaking in riddles. * At what point it becomes morally correct to join the zombies. * Why is it okay to name a thing after another thing? Why is it okay to name a band after someone else's song? * Whether Skibidi Toilet has been cool, is currently cool, will become cool temporarily, or will become cool and stay forever. * A meme based on a Youtube thing. * Dadaist comedy Internet videos made in Garry's Mod. * Changing the head so it's not owned by Valve. * Generations starting the alphabet over, like hurricane names. * Turn of the millennium coffee shop war stories. * Drinking coffee at 2 AM on January 1st, 2000, looking out the window and waiting for the satellites to come crashing down. * Tech folks successfully convincing people that the Y2K bug is a problem, but not what the problem actually was. * What the Y2K bug was and how we solved it. * The Corolla Must Have Control. * The phone is too eager and the car is too greedy. * The phone and the bluetooth speaker agreeing to connect, and isn't there somebody you forgot to ask?? * We invented this new thing but we don't know what it's for. Let's try to solve every problem with it and see if anything sticks. * Everybody migrating to TempleOS to get away from LLMs. * A lightweight operating system designed to be the Third Temple from the Hebrew bible. * Writing to your colleague to retract the continuum hypothesizing. * God's Chosen Programmer. * Off-Topic Lords. * A poem on the back of a bag of carrots. * A poem having been added to a bag of carrots by a scoundrel. * How many carrots you need to eat before you can be called a carrot man. * Explaining hidden tracks by first explaining that music used to come in this form called "albums." * If you have topics to talk about, we have a show for that, you don't put it on a hidden track on a CD in the 1990s. * Living to regret your self-own.

    1h 5m
  8. 1 SEPT

    306. You Wouldn't Believe The Brutes They Make

    Lords: * Xalavier * https://store.steampowered.com/app/3139570/CoopKaijuHorror_Cooking/ * Cort Topics: * What's the coolest instrument to give a child? * What happened to sound lasers? * Appearing Canes * https://www.amazon.com/Healifty-Retractable-Collapsible-Professional-Accessories/dp/B093G7J6JG * The Story of Mel * http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/story-of-mel.html * https://melsloop.com/docs/the-story-of-mel/pages/mel-kaye-cv Microtopics: * Whether your middle name is really Danger. * Half an extra plug. * The inexplicable aliveness of Strange Scaffold. * Co-op Casual Horror Cooking. * Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival. * Making a game so that you can voice act the main character. * How many careers you're allowed to have before the world begins to rip them away from you. * Hiring the designer of Frog Fractions when Frog Fractions is already designed. * A boxing game featuring the inside of your mouth. * Knockout Kings 2003 or Fight Night Round 3. * Your dad explaining all the ways grownups are better than children while soundly trouncing you at Fight Night Round 3. * Tattooing a message on your infant son's head so that he reads it when he begins to bald. * Playing music with humans. * What's special about playing an analog monosynth. * Getting an analog synthesizer and finally sounding like the 70s. * Your larynx thinking "I'm singing meat!" while you push air through it, making it vibrate. * All the ways your larynx is confused about the nature of music. * Sitting in a circle and playing music together. * The Topanga Banjo and Fiddle Festival. * Playing folk songs within ten minutes of owning a mandolin. * How Irish sessions compare to Bluegrass sessions. * Being too far back in the crowd to have sex with Neil Young. * A big long guitar with only four strings. * Bass Sherpa Hunter Bond. * Practicing bass with your bass unplugged because plugging in your bass feels like an imposition. * Short-scale basses. * Finding the bass that makes it feel like you're holding Mjolnir. * The Minibrute, Microbrute, Matrixbrute and Polybrute. * The problematic acoustic P-bass. * Travel amps and amp alternatives. * The non-problematic acoustic P-bass. * Oh yeah, that's the acoustic bass player! * The only instrument in a rock band that can go up to. x6 multiplier. * Coming back to Rock Band after learning the actual instrument. * The Rock Band Pro Controller. * What about Second Topic? * Asking a parent if it's okay to give their child an accordion and backpedaling when they start white-knuckling their chair. * Kung fu instructionals. * The smallest member of the mandola family. * Instruments that require elongation. * Chapman sticks. * The kind of musical instrument you can stab someone with. * Vibrating your bones. * That time science stopped itself from inventing something awful. * Non lethal directed acoustic energy weapons. * Sound cannons as an anti-piracy measure. * SASERs. * Using headphones as a microphone and vice versa. * Plugging a bass into a guitar amp. * Traveling to another country and trying out the basses that they have there. * Whacking the high tension wires to make laser noises. * What they have on BART now instead of high tension wire noises. * Raising Cain's. * Trying to reload your appearing cane. * The type of thing the TSA would miss but should watch out for. * Terrorists taking over the plane by doing such an impressive magic show that the passengers are like "that was amazing, we'd better do what he wants" * It poked me straight in the middle of my eye. * A sound laser for mischief and giggles. * Fighting those who would be your comrades in shenanigans. * Easy to operation! * If you love something, let it go. If you hold onto it, it will stab you in the hand. * A frog boiling effect but for extremely long poems. * Computers made out of drums and vacuum tubes. * Royal McBee Computer Corp. * Executing another complete revolution to find the next instruction. * If the thesis of Summoning Salt was that "this is what all gamers should be doing all the time." * When you get old enough that most of the people you don't like are now dead. * When you decide to hate somebody, taking comfort in the fact that one day they will die, or maybe you'll die, and either way you won't have to deal with them any more. * Taking comfort that Mel is out there writing in direct hexadecimal for all us sinners. * Jobs you wish you'd had in the past but that you wouldn't take today. * The honor in choosing not to be famous. * Our first pangram rhyme scheme. * Version control plugins that scan commits for variable names that scan to the Ninja Turtles theme. * Winston on the Microbrute.

    1h 6m

About

Every week, Jim invites different friends to guest on Topic Lords and be excited about whatever they've been fixated on this week.

You Might Also Like